VMware Aria Operations Reviews

I guess the faults, the alerts, are the most valuable feature; being able to see what could become a problem when I'm running out of virtual machine capacity, and definitely the faults, as far as whether there any issues with the VM storage, any performance issues. I mostly use it for CPU contention, memory contention, as well as latency, obviously; to correlate latency between data stores and virtual machine latency, virtual machine disk latency as well.

I have a dashboard now; I set up dashboards for the help desk team. They are able to look at the dashboard and see right away if there's a VM issue, or whether it’s an actual guest OS issue or an application issue. I think that's the easiest. That's the best feature that I've gotten out of it, as far as the organization is concerned. They are able to understand the information they're seeing.

I was able to sell some custom dashboards to the community. I was able to download some of the dashboards that they have and it's like a help desk central type of a dashboard, where you can drill down to the VM that you're having issues with, and it'll tell you right there and then if there's memory, CPU or a storage contention problem. That's the easiest thing to go by.

I would like to see better built-in policies, so when you deploy an environment, you are able to apply policies that are more realistic for a production environment. That would definitely be a nice release.

They do have some policies now centered around a production environment; maybe easier to make exceptions with where, if you have an alert, you can say, "Don't worry about it. It's an exception. Don't notify me again about this issue.", instead of having it come back up again after a few months. That would be nice.

Once I figure I know this is not a real issue, maybe I can flag something saying, "This is something I know about. You don't need to notify me again about this." Or maybe say "This can be an exception to this rule.", without needing to change the whole policy around, just for that one VM. Maybe there is a way of doing that, I don't know, but I haven't figured it out.

I've had no issues with stability, to be honest; it's worked really well.

We only have two sites on which we use it, so we have two of the servers deployed. So far, for our needs, the scale is fine. It's a web-driven menu just like the web client, so it's kind of sluggish sometimes when I'm down in to certain menus, but overall it's not so bad.

I have not used technical support since this release. I have used it in the past when it used to be called vCloud Operations. When it was vCOps, that's when I had more issues with it. I had to call technical support. But now that it's vROps, no, I've had no issues.

It’s the first-use solution I've used for VMware.

I was the one to set it up. The new setup environment's pretty straightforward. Setting up the alerts, definitions and actions were kind of tricky because there's a lot of false positives. A lot of things it alerts you on are not really problems, so you have to go in and tweak the policies around to see the actual real issues. Sometimes the notifications can be too aggressive, where it notifies you of almost every little thing that can possibly be wrong but in reality, it's not an issue. That tweaking does take a while to get figured out. It's an ongoing process. I'm still doing it to this day. It takes a while.

Maybe after the fact, we looked at VMTurbo a little bit, but that was already after I'd purchased vROps. So it wasn't very realistic as far as going after that product. We also have Veeam Availability Suite, which comprised the same functionality as well. That's because of the way we purchased Veeam for our backup environment. The Availability Suite just came with the backup environment. The vendor gave it to us that way. We don't really use it too much. It seems like Veeam is a nice product as well.

Definitely look into your other products, along with vROps as well. We were short on time, so we made a decision when we should have probably researched more. See what's out there. See how well it compares to other products. I'm sure there are other products that'll do just as well. That would be my number one recommendation. Try to do a PoC with multiple products.

See what fits best for your environment, and what fits best for your staff as well. If you have a dedicated VMware guy, maybe vROps is great. Or maybe, if you need that level of trainability, vROps is great. If you want something right out of the box that just works and just tells you the high-level information and the kind of nuts and bolts of what's wrong with your environment, without having to do too much modifications or tweaking, then maybe something out there is maybe better.

The most valuable feature is being able to see what's actually going on, down to the VMware storage level. And the fact that it can give you a suggested change and it'll explain why.

The most common thing we see is that we've got too many CPUs on a virtual machine. It'll say - and there's always a debate - or someone thinks it could be running out of memory, and it's actually because it has too many CPUs.

A lot of guys want to add more memory or more CPUs and it'll know why. It helps me with the other guys on the team and to show them why, because if you look at it, it'll tell you: This is what's going on and this is what you need to do. Also, a lot of times, there's a link for more information. You can find that information and read up on it, such as a KB article that explains what the product is telling you. There's not a lot of space in the product itself; just a little synopsis about why you should do it. It's readable for a VMware admin. If you're a regular system administrator, you might not understand what they're saying or doing.

Probably the most common benefit is catching problems. It has a view where it shows you a hot spot that starts turning red and you're see there's an issue. It also shows trends, so you can see how long it has been going on and other things like that.

We don't currently use the increased automation feature or integration with DRS for load balancing and scheduling. We're looking into doing it, but it's a trust factor. We're afraid it'll add a CPU or take away a CPU – things like that – on the fly, and we're not comfortable with that yet. It gives us suggestions and we'll implement those, but we don't want it to just automatically do it. I expect in the future, we will. We've had about six months and we're happy with it so far.

It’s difficult to say whether we have had specific cases where it has helped us avoid outages or shortened outage times, because when something comes up, we usually address it. So, I wouldn't know if we avoided an outage. I haven't seen anything super serious.

It has helped us with performance management; getting the VMs tuned better. And that's what I think it's really good at. We have a staff of six VMware admins, and some are less experienced than others, so they'll overbuild a VM or something like that.

Even though we don't have the full license for the full vRealize automation and some automation is already built in, I’d like to see them expand that and make it a little easier to use.

Also, it is very CPU intensive. It's hitting the storage, or I guess more storage. Our storage admins are always complaining it's one of the most utilized virtual machines out there. They're saying it's just as high as any of our big databases. If they could improve the performance, so our storage guys will quit complaining about the usage on the data storage. They're saying the virtual machine is probably using more IOPS than almost every other virtual machine in the environment. It's constantly checking the environment.

I think the learning curve on setting it up could be improved; it takes a while to understand it. I wouldn't say I’ve mastered it at all. I'm still working on it. If you really want to get into the automation portion, you've got to learn a lot of Python and things like that, because that's what it's using underneath.

I think it's pretty stable.

As far as scalability goes, we have fairly a decent-sized environment and it doesn't seem to have an issue. We don't see a performance issue, but when our storage guys are looking at their console, they're getting worried because it's one virtual machine and this product stores a lot more than all the others.

I have not used technical support. I don't think we've used technical support; we've used our TAM to help us set it up, get it going and fix it up. I think we had one issue because we couldn't get it set up correctly and we had to call support. They were very good at resolving the issue, they just kind of walked us through it.

We previously used SolarWinds Virtualization, and it was not real time. We wanted something that was real time. It was always behind, because it was polling once in a while; it goes and grabs the data. So you'd be looking at all the data and it wasn't real. A problem would no longer, even though I'm looking at it. It's fine, I guess, for long-term monitoring, but when I wanted to deal with issues that were immediate, it wasn't a good fit for us.

There were no other vendors on our short list. We did the proofs of concept and liked vROps, so we went from there.

I think the most important criteria when we went with vROps was because it was a VMware product. We were more likely to choose it. They were getting the integration we wanted, so we didn't really look at a lot of other products.

Do the proof of concept. I think that'll tell you what you need to know; if it's going to be a good fit for your environment. I would say that's probably applicable for anything you're going to look at.

One of the key things is the ability to integrate data from other sources. That's always a huge issue. I'll give an example: We've got an issue in an Oracle database. We go to the Oracle database team to get data from the Oracle management tools. We go to the virtualization to ensure the data there. The last layer's a whole other thing. vROps brings them all together. Any tool that does that is a useful tool.

Also, the data retention is better compared to what vCenter does by default. vCenter keeps data for only a short window of time, so if it's an hour after a problem manifests, you're out of luck. vROps makes a copy of all the data from vCenter; it keeps its own copy and it can maintain it longer because it's not an actively used database that's trying to manage the system. It's just a copy for reference purposes.

One of the things we're going to look at is experimenting with the integration with DRS. In fact, I attended a session at a conference on that. We're looking at integrating it with our Citrix XenApp environments; we currently have somewhat of a gap on that reporting there as well. That's 2 areas we definitely are looking at using it for.

We have had major outages that we would have caught in advance had vROps been in place.

With both capacity management and performance management, we expect to gain. The outages I mentioned were capacity or performance related. They were in areas of capacity that we could not see with our current tool set without a lot of digging around, which are very easily accessible with vROps.

You can always improve the type of data you can merge in, but there's nothing that we're missing at the moment from it. I'm sure as we dig deeper into it, we'll start finding room for improvement.

The reporting can always be improved. The problem is that no one does reporting well, because no one can know what your company needs out of the tool. I'm sure refinements with the reporting would be great. I'm sure they'll be refining it with every version, but it's not something that's inherent to them; it's an inherent problem with any tool that's trying to report data. I've found no tools that report data the way you need it to be reported.

We’ve been using it for a couple of months now; we've been experimenting. Previous versions were not as strong. The last version before this one was when they started to actually make the tool particularly useful, and then the latest version's even better.

Stability is much better than it used to be. They went to a distributed model, so it's stable and you can expand and grow with it.

Early versions did not use a completely balanced distributed model. As the number of items being collected grew, performance could not be scaled easily by adding additional servers to the vROps infrastructure. The newer versions handle this much better and allow for performance to be maintained at high numbers of items being collected.

You can now expand outwards horizontally, which you think they would've done initially, but you know... If you have an instance, you can build it taller with more CPU and memory, or you can build multiple instances. You can build instances out in remote sites to collect data there. It's a scalable solution now, which it was not completely before.

I don't know what their limits are, but it's certainly scalable enough to accommodate our needs.

It does not get slow; that's why the model's much better.

We haven't used technical support for scaling it yet, but I'm sure we will.

We decided to invest in this type of solution because of gaps in our current reporting. There are certain constraints we're running into in the environment that we cannot attack easily with any other tool.

We currently use a lot of other tools. We use TeamQuest. We use Cirba. We use CA; both their standard monitoring tool and their application performance monitoring tools. Even with all those, there's certain nuances within virtualization that they can't easily capture. We'd either have to automate scripts for ourselves to pull the data and then use something else to do it, or we can use vROps, which is why we're installing it.

The most important criteria when we select apps and vendors is our experience working with VMware and the ability to take data from multiple sources, which a lot of tools cannot easily do.

I’m involved mostly with the engineering of how we're going to use it. Most of their products are really easy to install.

We've looked at VMTurbo and we've talked with the other vendors that I’ve mentioned we use, to see if there are ways of doing what we want to do within their goals.

There's been mass improvements; if they've looked at it previously, like a few years ago, I would look at it again. We looked at it a few years ago, decided it wasn't for us, but it's useful. Particularly if you're dealing with a large-scale enterprise, there are gaps in all the other toying that are hard to get at without this tool because this tool has much more direct access to the right areas of vCenter. You can use the API to get at anything, but VMware knows what to pull better because it's their product.

The most valuable feature is mainly having a single point where you can see all of the performance of the whole cluster; see the CPU bottlenecks, the memory bottlenecks, apps on the storage side, on the network side.

Right now, we use it mainly for performance management, so we know what's happening, although we use it more reactively; we're not in a proactive mode. Meaning, every day, or every hour, we look at the backend to see what has happened, but it's not like a predictive DRS.

I have heard that vROps 6.3 will be able to integrate with DRS, and I think that will help us automate the DRS from vROps, and make the configuration change from vROps.

Before vROps, we didn't have any view into what's happening inside VMware. We had some monitoring on the OS level. Meaning, we had Zenoss, Hobbit, and other things that monitor the operating system on Windows or Linux, but we didn't have anything on the ESX side.

I do not have any specific cases where it helped us avoid an outage or reduce outage time, but it does provide a good view of root cause analysis, after the fact. It has helped me a lot with root cause analysis. When something happens and I go back and I want to see what exactly went on, I can really clearly get it from vROps.

There have been cases when the capacity management has helped me, but again it's all reactive, not predictive. Meaning, when I get an alert, I then look at vROps and see what it says. From there, I can figure out I have an issue. If I don't address it in a week, it could become a disaster.

The same thing with performance management. For us, everything is in more of a reactive mode; we know after the fact and it helps us with investigation.

I think that user interface needs to change a little bit. It's too technical. You need to be a really technical person who has worked with VMware a lot to really be able to navigate your way through. If you are, say, a junior sys admin, you might get lost. You have to really know your stuff. The user interface needs to be intuitive.

I wasn't impressed with the stability in 5.5. But 6.2 is much better.

We have 1600 VMs, and scalability is good. We used to run two instances in 5.5. With 6.2, I'm running one instance; I'm fine. It does not slow down at all.

I occasionally use VMware technical support, and it is bad, to be honest. Sometimes when I create a ticket sometimes, it takes them 12 hours, 24 hours, to get back to me. I have clearly said that production is down, and they didn’t get back to me. We have to engage the team to get a resource to work on it.

We were previously using Foglight. At some point, we realized that Foglight is too slow; it doesn't give us what we're looking for and we started looking for another solution. The time came to renew VMware licenses, so we just added it. The main reason was to get away from Foglight because it wasn't good.

I am the one that set it up. I followed the documentation that came with it and it was straightforward.

We looked at VMTurbo, and we loved their product, but it's more expensive. The VMTurbo user interface is phenomenal; very easy to move. It gives you everything you're looking for. Plus, whoever did the user interface testing at VMTurbo was the sys admin; for vROps, it might have been a programmer. You need to have a sys admin as one of the guys who tests the product and its suitability. With vROps, I need to know what I'm looking for.

It's one of the best products that does the job. It hooks into the VMware suites. From that angle, I believe it's more preferable than the others.

The most valuable feature is being able to see what's going on in the environment, to identify where problems might be or where we could potentially have problems in the future.

I'm pretty pleased with the product. Right now, I can't really say anything negative about it.

We probably used the older version for the last couple of years. We're actually in the process of rolling out the new vRealize Operations, so we don't have it fully implemented yet; that's where we're at. We changed our licensing model to buy the vCloud Standard, which included it. Right now, we're in the process of getting it spun up.

It seems very stable. I know the previous version was stable. No downtime at all.

It seems to be very scalable for the environment that I'm dealing with, which is a fairly large environment. It's not the biggest environment in the world, but it's definitely scalable for my environment.

I think their support has some challenges. I've had better support from other vendors, to be honest. Some of my biggest complaints are delays in getting problems resolved and getting responses. I can say that is pretty much the same for my colleagues as well.

Initial setup is straightforward. We set it up in-house.

I recommend it. I think it's a great solution. I think it's a great product as far as vSphere environments, because it is geared towards vSphere; made by the people who created vSphere.

When I decide to work with a vendor, I think longevity is an important criteria. I like to make sure that I'm partnering with a vendor that's going to be around tomorrow. I like to see a large footprint. That way I know there's widespread adoption for their product. I like responsiveness, when I have a demand, or a need.

The automation is the most valuable feature; the whole automation and building a VM from scratch, all the way to the VM and life cycle the VM.

We can build a VM faster. From the same business unit, we can deploy VM in less time than we were doing it before.

There's some improvements that they can do as far as make it more user-friendly and get away from Java.

It's not that easy to understand and I found even at VMware, it is really hard to get someone that can answer some of the questions we have as far as the product.
I think they released a new solution recently, so I need to go back and see what's new on it but I’ve already seen some things that got fixed as far as going from one version to another. For example, there's more integration with vRA now.

Stability’s good; no problems at all.

Scalability is great.

I have not really used technical support.

We were doing a lot of scripting, and that doesn't scale to the way we wanted it to, so that's why we're going to use vRA.

Our most important criteria when selecting a vendor like VMware is that it will support Unix and Windows at the same time; VMware was more user-friendly with Unix machines; it comes with certain versions and flavors of Unix.

The initial setup was easy, but what came after that was complex, due to the fact that we needed to have multiple modules.

We’re thinking of Microsoft Azure Stack. It's not out on the market yet, but we're waiting on that.

Is it worth the money? That would be the question.

Because we're only using the foundation version, it's really nice to be able to have the one spot to look at all the details over the last six hours, troubleshooting, tagging on the performance statistics together.

We typically dive into it for troubleshooting when our customers complain of performance issues. It really helps by showing a little bit better-detailed report of how high latency is, storage and networking.

Because we're using the free version, it's nice that we can show our management team that, hey, it is a useful feature, so maybe we need to invest in a better monitoring tool for these solutions.

t also helps some of my newer technicians understand how the different components of a vSphere infrastructure actually work, or tied together a little bit.

I'd like a little bit more usability out of the foundation level, because our customers say it's really small. So it's hard to justify going up to that next level.

One of the biggest areas with room for improvement is more automated reports, so I don't have to send technicians in to get them.

I haven't had any stability issues at all.

Our problem is we're a management solution provider for multiple customers. All our sites are very distributed and have their own vCenters. So the problem is that I have no single console to view all of our environments in a singular spot. Each site gets their own vROps or vCOPS. Then we have to go into each one and review it as needed.

We do not really use technical support. We don't have a lot of need to go to technical support for the monitoring solution.

Initial setup was really straightforward because we just use the virtual appliance deployment.

We use this solution because I need a way to show my customers what we're doing in order to justify what they're paying for support.

I haven't had a chance yet to look at any other vendors, so far.

With the foundation version being included with vSphere software, it doesn't hurt to have it in there. So usually at least deploy that because then, if you upgrade, all that data comes with it.

If I was using the standard version with all the additional features, I might have rated it a little bit higher.

vROps is integrated with vRealize and VMware solutions, which helps us to get the best operation-level understanding across the environment; we get all the utilization reports.

By using vROps, you can actually automate your tasks, integrate it with vRO workflows, and amazing results can come up.

We have also used the integrations with DRS using the Site Recovery Manager, which are quite good. If anything happens at one site, another site immediately takes over; you can do that using vROps.

We have improved our understanding in terms of writing PoCs, and providing concrete examples of how vROps and vRA can get into the environment.

It should have some connectors in terms of showcasing third-party vendor's functionalities. For example, if some third-party storage that has been connected to the environment, this solution should actually be used instead of some third-party monitoring solution. This solution should work across the environment on its own, instead of relying on some trigger-pointed third party location and then acting it on it.

It should have some more functionality in terms of getting some more third-party vendor application-level integration.

The majority of VMware products are very stable, and I'm very happy with vROps.

I have not encountered any scalability issues.

For PoCs, we have set it up for a cluster of five servers to showcase the scalability of VMware products.

I have used technical support, because the VMware solutions guidelines are quite complete and amazing.

I previously used a lot of freeware monitoring tools like Cacti, Nagios, and Ganglia.
We felt that we needed to invest in paying for a solution because it's amazing. The integration with the VMware family is amazing.

Initial setup is 9/10; it was nearly flawless. Some minor configuration services were complex; how you connect it out across, or how you actually connect two different services.

Before choosing this product, I did not evaluate other options.